Warrior Brothers (30 page)

Immediately, I placed an open hand out to the man to inform him to stay where he was. Heater and I both took aim at him. The convoy was informed that a suspect vehicle was stopped behind us in the military lane.

Heater and I waited in nervous anticipation. Was this a suicide-bomber? Why was he just sitting there and staring at us so intensely? Was he trying to decide whether we were a target worthy of his death? We were three security contractors. We didn't look like a diplomatic convoy, but he wouldn't care. We kept our weapons trained on his chest and he just stared back, still gripping the steering wheel with both hands. It was intense.

We were even more endangered because we were in a retro-armoured vehicle, which is a cheap alternative and offers minimal protection only. If this car exploded at a distance of 30 metres, what would the shock wave do to us? Would our eardrums and lungs burst? Would we have time to duck our heads before large chunks of metal sailed over the metal plate that covered our rear seat?

We didn't have enough information to open fire but would have to make up our minds immediately if things changed. We were expecting his vehicle to surge forward as he depressed the accelerator pedal all the way to the floor. Was he going to do it? I also realised that momentum, even if he was killed quickly, would carry his vehicle many metres closer to us. We couldn't move forward. If we tried to force our way into the checkpoint, we'd be filled with bullets, courtesy of the US military. They were nervous enough without us making their job even more difficult. We just had to sit it out.

Safety catches had been disengaged for some time now. It was up to him. If he accelerated aggressively towards us, he was going to be killed. But what if he remained calm and gently rolled our way? Was he capable of such controlled deceit in the moments before he vaporised himself? I told Heater I would give him one final warning before shooting out his left front tyre. After that, if he still continued, my next round would be into his chest.

The man then started to smile, then appeared to break into laughter. He threw his car into reverse and backed up about 50 metres, began to make a right-hand turn and then briefly stopped. He looked at us one last time before driving off.

What were his intentions? Was he a bomber who got cold feet? Was he carrying out a rehearsal in order to see how close he could get to the checkpoint before being challenged? We will never know.

The horrific waste of suicide-bombing as a strategy really hit home. After all, who really cares if three security contractors are killed, other than their families? The bomber would have blown himself into thousands of pieces for no real gain. The futility of it all. Why would someone want to end their own life to achieve something so small? We weren't a trophy worth giving up one's life for. Maybe that's why he drove away.

I reflected long and hard on the differences between myself and the suicide-bomber. If I were him, rather than blow myself up once, I'd try to kill as many soldiers as possible for as long as possible. Killing two or three men who weren't in the military, and sacrificing my own life in the process, just wouldn't be a worthwhile task. This man and hundreds just like him had a different outlook. They were quite happy to do it. I have tried to understand why, and although I am aware of several differing motivations – from belief in a cause to familial financial reward – I guess, just like suicide, unless one has thought about it, how can one pass judgement?

If I'm completely honest with myself, the real reason that I was there with Heater, and the reason that I deployed so often with the teams, was a basic desire for excitement. I didn't want to miss out. In that respect, I hadn't changed much since my first deployment years before.

But with experience and responsibility had come a new set of motivating factors. Most powerful was my sense of guilt. I wanted to keep my mates alive. I'd encouraged many of my friends to join this project, and I was responsible for sending them out each day. If I was concerned about a threat to the team, I would deploy with them. So, too, would the project manager, Jim.

In my attempts to get so involved in the task, in minimising their risk to exposure, I almost drove myself crazy. I don't know if it worked or if we were just lucky, but it made me tired. So tired. I had very little or no fear for what might happen to me – my wife wouldn't have been overjoyed to hear this – but I knew I did not want to confront a friend's wife and try to explain that her husband had been killed because I made a poor decision.

When we discussed it, Heater reassured me that we were all here of our own accord. ‘The guys are as well prepared as
they are ever going to be,' he said. ‘It wouldn't be because of you.'

The men trained hard, the rapid-reaction force was always on standby when a team was mobile, and the ops team put an enormous amount of thought into the tasking, but I'm still relieved I don't have to live with the thought that I had killed a friend.

In Iraq, I saw devastation and tremendous loss of life, tragedies and horrors that occurred for no better reason than the human tendency towards war. But my experience after Iraq, when human destruction was not the cause of the suffering, affected me even more powerfully.

A man and his two sons posed for a photo. Their despondency cut deep into the lens. It was such a potent sense of grief that for a moment I froze, camera in hand, rendered inoperable by the tide of emotion that radiated from the subjects.
Click
. The photo was taken, the image captured, the misery recorded for history.

I paused again, not wanting to share this distressing image with the father. He would take no joy out of seeing his sons' vacant stares. The boys weren't looking into the lens but gazed in the direction of where their house once stood. Their mouths and noses were covered with white surgical masks to prevent them from smelling the stench of death that hung thick in the air. Their mother and sisters were gone, buried under the rubble of their home in front of them.

It would have been impossible for the man to lift the slabs of rubble on his own. He knew where his family were but was helpless and could only stare at the site and mourn. The boys were well dressed and stood hand in hand, while their father had his hands on their shoulders. One of the boys had a graze on his left leg. Their father's bloodshot, sleepless eyes were swollen and tired. His face was an agonising image of sorrow, but he was carrying on. He had to continue to live, for his two boys depended on him.

On 26 December 2004, I was at home in Australia, packing my bags and wishing for the day to end before I returned to Iraq. The day before departure was never pleasant. I usually spent it reflecting on all the things that I should have done and would attempt to do the next time I returned home. I'd begin to distance myself from my wife, and my children would struggle to understand why Dad had suddenly become so tense and serious. Although I was still physically present, in reality I was no longer at home.

Running operations in Iraq was stressful. A poor tactical decision from me could very well result in the death of a close friend or colleague. Therefore, I always began analysing intelligence reports 48 hours before I returned so I could have a smooth transition.

I sat at my computer, trying mentally to put myself back in Iraq. As I worked, news of an earthquake and tsunami flashed across my computer screen. The early reports did nothing to prepare me for the scale of the catastrophe. Images from Thailand and Sri Lanka dominated the broadcasts. The footage showed a swollen horizon and waves washing into the lower levels of tourist resorts. People were initially surprised and intrigued but this soon turned to fear as the water levels began to rise.

There were no early pictures from Banda Aceh, as the region's infrastructure had been totally wiped out. An entire Indonesian army battalion had been annihilated, including several hundred police officers who were accommodated in the same barracks. While the earthquake created terror, the tsunami consumed everything in its path. The Western world was oblivious to the extent of this brutality and it would be many days before the horrifying depth of the devastation was known.

I boarded the flight to Iraq thinking that several thousand people had been killed across Asia. I landed in Baghdad to
news that the death toll was estimated to be in excess of 100,000. I took this knowledge in and spared a thought for those lost, but I was more concerned about getting back into the swing of things in Iraq.

As with so much private contracting work, I swung between thriving in my work as a security operations manager and finding it deeply frustrating, wondering what I was even doing there. One afternoon in early January the operations director of the company I worked for came to see me. He wanted to know how good my Indonesian was. In the context, it was a strange question.

‘It used to be pretty solid,' I replied, ‘and it wouldn't take me too long to pick it back up.'

The director, John, asked if I would like to lead the security element of a humanitarian assistance mission into Banda Aceh. I didn't realise it at the time, but agreeing to coordinate this task would open a door to one of the most fulfilling experiences of my life, one which would change the way I thought about my vocation forever.

My knowledge of the situation in Banda Aceh was limited, but I quickly familiarised myself. An earthquake measuring between 9.1 and 9.3 on the Richter scale, the second-largest earthquake in recorded history, had devastated the north-west Sumatran coast. The quake had struck at 07:58:53 local time on 26 December 2004. Within 30 minutes a tsunami had crashed into Banda Aceh, consuming everything in its path. The wave was driven by a power unprecedented in recent history. Its legacy was widespread death and destruction.

Imagine you are standing 100 metres in front of a 30-metre dam wall. The space between you and the dam is littered with vehicles, debris, trees, sheets of corrugated iron, bricks, stones and the various other detritus that is part of an overcrowded Indonesian city. You stand there and watch as some greater being lifts the dam wall into the sky in one swift motion. You hear the sickening roar of water that
explodes towards you with the force of an atomic blast. Heavily laden trucks are picked up like toys and hurled towards you. As you are hit by the force of the wave your body is crushed before your mind even has a chance to identify that this is real. This is the death that hundreds of thousands faced in Banda Aceh.

After my lengthy stint in Iraq, I was no stranger to loss of life on a large scale, but the situation in Banda was unlike anything I had faced before. To date, in almost five years of fighting in Iraq there have been over 4000 US military personnel killed. Estimates of the number of Iraqi fatalities vary, but according to the Iraq Health Ministry survey, around 400,000 Iraqis have been killed (as of June 2006). These are devastating figures representing an unthinkable loss of life.

Over 230,000 people were killed in Banda Aceh – not in years, months, weeks or even days, but in minutes. The wall of water that struck Banda Aceh was so fierce, so violent, so destructive that everything within 800 metres of the coast was entirely laid to ruin. Areas up to 1.5 kilometres into the city merged with the ocean, and the deadly torrent of brown death continued for two kilometres inland in some places. At the mercy of Mother Nature, hundreds of thousands of people met an untimely, swift and violent death.

Initially, Heater and I were deployed to Banda Aceh to protect a team of engineers whose task was to establish two mobile water-treatment units. These units were capable of turning 1200 litres of brown sludge into potable water every minute. This was a humanitarian assistance mission and our role was to ensure the engineering task was a success. We were facilitators. Our knowledge of Indonesian customs, our ability to converse in the local dialect and our contacts with the Australian military would allow these engineers to do their jobs.

Before we arrived, Jerry, the project manager, had flown to
Banda Aceh and spent an uncomfortable night dodging mosquitoes and heavy rain. In the morning he decided that the task could not go ahead. There was no accommodation, it was difficult to source vehicles, the military weren't helping with flights and no-one seemed to speak English. I was desperate to change Jerry's mind and knew that we could achieve all these things within 24 hours.

Heater and I arrived in Medan and I asked Jerry to watch Heater at work. He had spent a lot of time working in Indonesia and was an exceptional linguist, and within minutes he had arranged vehicles and supplies. But Jerry was still not convinced. I quickly sourced a flight for Heater on a military aircraft to Banda Aceh, and in less than 12 hours he had secured a three-storey villa for a base, three vehicles with drivers, cooks and people to wash the team's clothing. As far as we were concerned, there was no reason for this task to be cancelled.

We knew how to get things done. When we were told that there were no flights available, we walked to the rear of the terminal, spoke with the air movements officer – sometimes paying a bribe – and we got our flight. Corruption works both ways. When we needed a forklift, we went straight to the Indonesian general in charge of the reconstruction effort and started a conversation in Bahasa. Once we had established this connection we asked for a forklift; to our delight, he said yes. The boys in Medan were kept busy arranging trucks to transport the units into Banda and strengthening military contacts. The Australian army later came to the party and sprayed not only our villa but also the street that we were living in with a substance to rid the area of mosquitoes.

The list of things to do was endless and I have never seen a team of men so determined. Their hearts and souls were in this task, and being part of such a worthwhile task would change the direction of my life.